I was at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, where I saw, among other work,Things, by Ben Rivers. It truck me as several films that should have been cut and submitted individually.
I just noticed that Ann Arbor gave it an award. This is not a comment on the jurors, of course (although we probably need to at least remark on the prominence of women's voices in these matters, both as jurors in the case of Ann Arbor and as represented artists, not to mention award recipients). The Rivers work had three parts, I believe. The first, in black and white and taking interest in grain and abstraction, had nothing to do with the last, which was in color and followed a squirrels exploits. Am I out of line if I say, hello . . ? I mean, that last color film (it was a film, it was a separate film, even if there was the attempt to name each segment after a season and string the squirrel together with the rest as "summer" or what) served as the kind of "experiment" that we see in video (a behavioral experiment, let's be clear here). The first film spliced into Things was much more about a particular graphic look. It seemed to me that we were seeing a short loop that contained the kind of scattered crud we see from in lab work with black and white reversal nowadays. Do you know what I'm mean? It could not figure out why this stuff was appearing on work so often now, but Rivers seems to have taken interest in it, or else just didn't notice the blemish. At any rate, the seasons didn't seem enough to justify all that time, and now he's got award for it. Bernie
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